Any discussion of the background art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such background are is prior art that is widely known or forms part of the common general knowledge in the field.
Collisions present a significant risk in the context of the operation of machinery. Traditionally, in cases where machinery is under the control of a human operator, it is the task of that operator to manually avoid collisions.
In more recent times, there has been an increase in automated control of machinery. Such machinery is controlled by automated means, and does not require a human operator. Of course, in absence of a human operator, collision avoidance becomes the responsibility of an automated control system, and various technologies have been developed for collision avoidance in automated control systems.
In spite of the rise in popularity of automated control systems, in many situations, human control continues to present the most appropriate approach, if not the only feasible approach. For example, in some instances technology is not yet sufficiently advanced to allow the automated control of certain machinery for certain tasks. In other instances, although the technology for automated control exists, the costs and/or logistics render such approaches impractical.
The ability of a human operator to manually avoid collisions is inherently limited, for example by factors such as experience, fatigue and the like. Various technologies therefore have been applied to human operated machinery to reduce the risk of collisions, with the general approach being to limit certain otherwise possible movements of the machinery. In the context of electric mining shovels, such technologies include Boom Profiling, which protects against dipper contact with a boom, and Cable Reel Protection, which protects against dipper contact with a cable reeler by inhibiting the machine house from swinging inside a predefined are at the rear of the machine. However, such technologies are relatively rudimentary in the overall scheme of the problems they attempt to solve.
There is a need in the art for systems and methods for reducing the probability of a collision between a first object whose trajectory is substantially controlled by an operator input command and a second object.